Lenovo streamlines its mobile business, sacks over 1,100 personnel across its global workforce

Lenovo, the Chinese multinational tech giant has today announced that after another sub-standard quarter of results, it has resorted to laying off a massive 1,100 personnel from its workforce. This sacking, which mostly impacts employees of the Motorola Mobility smartphone division, accounts for almost 2 per cent of its humongous 55,000 employee team globally.

This round of lay-offs follows pursuit to the large-scale(i.e 3,200 to be exact) reduction in headcount late last year. It was undertaken in response to economic uncertainties, currency fluctuations, decline in PC demand as well as increase in smartphone competition. The company had then said that these lay-offs will affect its non-manufacturing workforce and help it save about $1.35 billion in annual wages(and that’s a huge number to push towards emulaitng growth in the current competititve market).

Commenting on the current round of lay-offs, a Motorola spokesperson confirmed the lay-offs to Droid-Life and said,

The cuts are part of the ongoing strategic integration between Lenovo and its Motorola smartphone business as the company further aligns its organization and streamlines its product portfolio to best compete in the global smartphone market.

In addition to the lay-offs, there have also been speculations that Lenovo is mulling over the idea of relocating some remaining Chicago-based staff to North Carolina — where Lenovo’s US headquarters are based. But, the company has debunked any rumors of such sort and reiterated the fact that “they are absolutely committed to Chicago and will remain there.”

Ever since the sale of the smartphone business to Google, and then to Lenovo, Motorola hasn’t been able to pick up and find its way back to glory days — those of the Razr and Turbo. The former had acquired the Moto phone business from Google for a meager $2.91 billion in late 2014.

The reported lay-offs by Lenovo, however, seem to be a part of the final steps that the company has taken to merge Motorola’s mobile business into their own. It has recently also taken steps to phase out the iconic ‘Motorola’ brand to show that their product line-up is now under the Lenovo umbrella. It has been renamed to “Moto by Lenovo”, though the corporate identity still continues to live on for a while.

In addition to streamlining the mobile business, the company is also making certain changes to its global product strategy and says,

The company is also making adjustments in other areas of the business as part of a continued effort to manage costs, drive efficiency and support ongoing improvement in overall financial performance. While these actions are never easy, they are a necessary part of our continued efforts to ensure long-term, profitable growth across all of our businesses.

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Lenovo has ruined both brands. Their Yoga PCs are a complete disgrace. IBM never would have locked Linux out of their Thinkpad lineup they way that Lenovo conspired with Microsoft to do with their laptops. Lenovo has developed a reputation for themselves as the company of Superfish and the BIOS that reinstalled crapware over and over. Their stock is down 2/3rds from last year. You’d have about 35 cents left for every dollar you invested in it. People are onto them.

Microsoft has dug into Lenovo like a predatory wasp taking over an ant and forcing it back to the nest to lay its eggs. I’m not surprised about what is going on with Motorola at all. Now there’s a patent license deal which will mean preinstalled Microsoft bloatware on their future Lenovo Android phones, wasting space on the storage, marked “system app” so you can’t get rid of it.

I might as well have gotten a Dell XPS. Pretty much the same hardware. Pretty much the same price as my Yoga, only the Dell can run Linux while Lenovo added code to the BIOS to make it impossible to install Linux.

Lenovo has mods, one with an MS MVP logo on his username, scrubbing the forums of anyone who complains about it.